


It's Not About the Plot

by RunWithWolves



Series: 25 Days of Sweetheart [7]
Category: Carmilla (Web Series)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-24
Updated: 2017-10-24
Packaged: 2019-01-22 15:04:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,396
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12484380
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RunWithWolves/pseuds/RunWithWolves
Summary: The truth is that it’s hard to say where the story starts. Some days, Laura will consider her first year at Silas as the beginning. Some days, it will be five years after she left the school. Some days, she starts the story in 1698 while in others she wonders if it starts in 1872.We're getting a movie soon. Let's talk about that.





	It's Not About the Plot

**Author's Note:**

> I've had this sitting around for a while and figured I might as well drop it before the movie. It's an interesting case study on a different type of narrative voice and a challenge of a dialogue-less story. Arguably it's closest to those theories I used to write and yes, the hypothetical plot is out of date with our current info.
> 
> My writing time got cut short by lab work today <3

The truth is that it’s hard to say where the story starts. Some days, Laura will consider her first year at Silas as the beginning. Some days, it will be five years after she left the school. Some days, she starts the story in 1698 while in others she wonders if it starts in 1872.

But today the story starts with dreams and everything before them is reduced to nothing but backstory. For every story demands a starting point and today the story starts in 2017 with a dream that seems so real that Laura feels like she could touch it. Her hair is coiffed, her nightdress is a far cry from the TARDIS pajama pants she put on when she went to bed, and the world looks as though it belongs in a castle.

Perhaps this is the best beginning because it contains both 2017 and 1872 in one moment. Two starts overlapping for a dizzying array of truth and reveals as backstory is made current all over again. 

For now, Laura is dreaming of a world long past and when she wakes, she’s curled up to her girlfriend like she never went anywhere as the Toronto skyline flickers into daylight. For now, dreams are still dreams. Snuggling back into Carmilla’s warmth, Laura embraces another day as a junior reporter and ignores the twinge of pain in the scar on her chest that never went away after a goddess of love pulled out her heart all those years ago.

The replacement heart, new and fresh and a gift from a death goddess, knows things that the heart she’d been born with did not. 

It knew the dead and the signs of their calling.

But for now the dreams are just dreams and Laura goes about her day while her nights are full of far off castles and dramatic ballrooms that she mentions only in passing. Carmilla smiling as Laura tries to imitate the dancing of a world long-lost before sweeping Laura into her arms and whirling her around the living room the way they’ve done a hundred times before. Laura laughs and kisses her. 

In her bedroom drawer is a small box and, when she wakes from dreams and the moon is up, she sometimes pulls it out and examines the sparkling diamond. 

Sometimes, she just wants to slip it on Carmilla’s finger where it belongs. 

Every time, something in Carmilla’s face stops her. Something in her chest, something dead and alive, warning her that it’s not time yet. That time she asked about the future and Carmilla had paused. That time family had come up and Carmilla had shivered. She’d always smiled right after. 

But.

The dreams grow, expanding until they come every night and fill her hours. Sometimes, Carmilla is there to hover over her. Draped from head to toe in black and every inch the vampire she once was, fangs glinting in the moonlight. Sometimes, Carmilla is there and dressed in white as a smiling companion with glows on her hands and her fangs well hidden. Nothing but affection in her eyes. 

It’s fun and a little bit ridiculous, like playing dress up in someone else’s clothing. Some else’s life. As this new world turns around her, Laura sometimes feels a whisper on the back of her neck like someone is calling her. Occasionally there’s something crawling in the veins of the skin of her dreams as though to tell her that this isn’t her real body. Like a mask that doesn’t slip on quite right or the north star seen from the edges of the wrong hemisphere.

This isn’t her. But it’s just a dream. 

It’s fun and ridiculous until it isn’t. 

Until the Carmilla of her dreams becomes the Carmilla of reality as a mystery rears it’s head and Carmilla’s vampirism returns; like an ember that even the gods can’t extinguish for fear of destroying the campfire entirely. Those fangs of yesterday jumping firmly to today.

Carmilla is a vampire again. Then human. Then a vampire. The past leaping forward and disappearing again like a ghost that was supposed to be buried. 

Ghosts never stay buried if they can’t move on. 

They call Laf, the best scientist they know, and can find no cure in science itself. So they wonder and they look for what sort of being could disrupt the power of a god to turn Carmilla back into what she once was. 

They have no answer but the terrible news Laf can deliver. Carmilla is dying. There is something out there killing her and the small of her once vampirism is the only thing holding it at bay. 

The answer comes in a girl who died nearly 150 years before as the crime of 1872 rears it’s head once again. The year Carmilla first fell in love. The year Carmilla first learned the word betrayal. The year a girl presumably died and the year Carmilla was buried in a coffin of blood for her crimes. 

Ell. Carmilla’s ex. Only mentioned in passing like something they can gloss over and leave to be forgotten to history.

Laura packs her suitcase quietly. The engagement ring gently placed inside an extra pair of running shoes because she can’t bring herself to leave it behind.

If you’re hunting ghosts it’s best not to do it alone and it only takes two calls to get Mel and Kirsch to join them. A third call is made to the number scratched on the bottom of an otherwise empty postcard but, despite Laura waiting with baited breath, there is no response from the vampiric Danny Lawrence. 

So they head out to a house that makes Carmilla pale as soon as they pull into the drive. Her half-human skin turning a sickly shade of white. Laura reaches out to grab her hand and Carmilla gives it a tight squeeze as she takes in a world she hasn’t seen since since 1920 when she couldn’t stop herself from coming back. Just to see.

That time, Carmilla had never made it up the drive.

Today she walks through the door with Laura’s hand in hers.

Laura had always imagined hunting ghosts to be a difficult task but five minutes and some flashlights reveals a veritable hoard of them appearing around them. Advancing on them. On Carmilla. Each one a young girl of barely twenty.

And Laura wonders in between the panic putting herself firmly between Carmilla and what lies around her.

The past and present blurred together. The lines are thinner here.

The girls are scared away by the two strongest presences who appear and it’s not the ghost they’re looking for. Instead, they find the Bronte Sisters waiting for them. Ghosts or vampires, it hardly matters. They are tangible enough to touch and set a dinner where they explain a recent increase in ghostly presence in the mansion. Laura questions. Carmilla sits. Sips a blood milkshake when her gums start to ache.

They are snuggled in their new room when Carmilla admits, in the dead of night, that the girls they saw were familiar faces. Every face she ever betrayed to her mother for sacrifice to the hungry light. She admits that she didn’t even recognize every one with a voice so small that Laura can do nothing but hold her tight and kiss her temple.

She admits that Ell wasn’t among them. 

When Laura dreams that night, the dreams feel even more real than they did in Toronto. After all, the line between worlds is thinner her. In this dream, she looks in a mirror. Looks in a mirror and realizes why the skin has never felt quite her own.

It’s not. 

A different face stares back at her and when she waves her fingers a strange set waves back. The face isn’t unfamiliar. Same brown waves and soft features. But it’s not hers. And something about it is clawing at her memory.

When she wakes, shaking with Carmilla still tucked in her arms, Laura breathes in the familiar smell of Carmilla and reminds herself that it’s just a dream.

It’s not.

It’s not when there’s a ball, a hallmark to days gone by where she gets to dress up in period costume and whirl around on Carmilla’s arm for an evening. She’s in love and happy and dancing until she see a familiar face in the corner of her eye.

The face in her dreams that wasn’t her own.

Laura flys across the ballroom alone, chasing the fleeing figure. A woman dressed all in black but bearing a face that Laura shouldn’t know.

Never quite catching it. 

When she tells the others, they insist that they never saw anything. There was no-one there. 

But Laura knows what she saw and she has a suspicion of who is appearing. A face that she saw once before in her dreams - dreams of warning to stay away from the hungry god who wanted to consume her soul the way it had others before her.

Laura is the one who got away. Laura should be a ghost in the crowd of girls that Carmilla saw downstairs.

Instead, she breathes. While, Ell inhabits her dreams and reaches out to her through a connection that was never truly broken. 

There is one thing the years cannot change and that is the fact that Laura Hollis is Laura Hollis so naturally she goes searching for her ghost. When Laura searches; she always finds. She remembers a necklace once before. A necklace slipped over her neck that gave another being control over her body. So, when she finds a necklace waiting for her on a dalice.

She slips it on.

She is Laura Hollis and she needs answers. A ring burning a hole in her pocket. 

She appears in the world of her dreams but her clothes stay the same. The face that she usually wears sitting across from her and offering her a spot of tea. So Laura sits, accepts, and asks questions. There are no answers that she likes. 

Because while there are hundreds of girls dead, Carmilla has somehow been allowed to get her happy ending. 

Did Carmilla really think she could get away with it?

She is forced to watch Carmilla drown in blood and forced to watch her heartbreak as Ell casts her away. Every tragedy of the story Carmilla told her in a dorm played out in full colour as Ell allows Laura into her memories to see the truth. 

A cruel love. A strange love. Had taken Ell’s life. 

Laura watched her die.

And so the past becomes reality as Laura wears her own face and slips through the world of yesterday. The huntress Carmilla once was appear in full form as the Carmilla of 1867 looks for a way to save her lady love.

But that lady love isn’t Laura.

And in struggling to find a way to save Ell, Carmilla approached Laura like a replacement. A girl that she can offer to her mother. To seduce. To befriend. To betray. 

There are consequences to every choice. 

The Woman in Black is a warning. Always has been. Always will be.

Laura watches Carmilla die. The Woman in Black appearing to warn her before she is murdered at a ball in 1698 and resurrected as the vampire she could become. There are 101 opportunities to change the past. A thousand small changes that would ensure Laura never finds Carmilla.

All Ell wants is a chance to move on, for all the ghosts to move on, and as far as she can tell - there best chance is revenge on the one who hurt them. Ell still trying to save the other girls. Ell attacks Laura and Carmilla appears to try and stop her; torn between love and guilt.

But. 

She’s not the villain of this piece. The ex-girlfriend thinks she wants revenge, thinks that Carmilla’s death results in her finally finding peace but stories are never that simple and a late stage twist reveals the true villain. 

For, why are the Bronte sisters in our story at all? Why are they living in a mansion that once belonged to the girl Carmilla loved? Why are all the ghosts, killed in different places over decades, all assembled here?

Ell just wants her peace but she will not find it with Carmilla. She will find it in the hands of the Brontes - two sisters who have twisted the reality of the world just to try and save their sister. For the Bronte sisters always come in threes but only two appear.

The third dead before her time.

Another girl lost to Carmilla’s past.

Their efforts, whether revenge on the one who killed their sister or in an effort to bring her ghost back, are what ties Ell and all the girls to the mortal plan. Not Carmilla. 

That doesn’t stop Carmilla from wearing their ghosts like a rucksack of guilt that cannot be thrown off. Until it can. 

There are no villains in this story for this story is written in the truth of the colour grey. There are no heroes either. Just sadness and pain and hope for a better tomorrow. 

The climax will come as plots must be resolved. Story must be written. But. The truth of the matter is the thing that pulls on heartstrings is never in the plot. It lives around it. In the spaces of the story where we leave pieces of ourselves inside the characters. 

It lives in the way that Ell will say goodbye, freeing Carmilla from her ghost before drifting off to her peace and taking the other girls with her. It lives in the way Ell smiles at Laura and tells them to live a good life. 

It lives in the way, finally free of her ghosts, that Carmilla plucks the ring from Laura’s pocket and slips it on her finger as Laura cries her way through a rambling, messy proposal.

It lives in the way this was never about the plot. Never has been. Never will be. This is story about relationships and truth and emotion and feeling and love. So much love. Love that cannot be confined to 2017 or 1698 or 1897. 

So the story starts where it starts and ends where it ends but neither of those things mean that it’s over. 

It’s just beginning.

**Author's Note:**

> if nothing else, i learned a lot from this and found the places where i think more stories will live inside it.
> 
> Cupcakes. Your kudos, comments and [ tumblr stop ins](http://ariabauer.tumblr.com/) have been most inspiring as i hit what will likely be the busiest week of this whole thing! So thank you.
> 
> REMINDER: we're doing request week again so if you have something you'd like to see written drop me a line in comments or tumblr and I'll put it on the list with 5 of your suggestions to be written next week!
> 
> Stay stupendous. Aria


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